Among the Old Testament's outward-looking announcements of salvation Isa 19,16–25 is the most radical, with its expectation of an eschatological recapitulation of Israel's own salvation-history by Egypt and a state of blessing for Egypt and Assyria, as peoples of YHWH, which fulfils the promise to Abraham in Gen 12,1–3. Alongside intertextual allusions to the periods of the Exodus and the Judges, the main contributing text is Isa 11,11–16. Its expectation of a return home from the diaspora is inverted, with the result that Egypt and Assyria are designated as YHWH's land in a way analogous to the election of Israel. Selected nonbiblical texts illustrate this eschatological hope as an expression of the optimism of the Egyptian diaspora which characterised the early Ptolemaic period. This claimed to have found in Egypt a home which had a potentially equal place in the history of salvation to the land of Israel itself, where it was legitimate to interact with the local culture and to live as a Jew.